


i wonder if you live there still (i kinda think you always will)

by sevensevan



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/F, I'm so sorry, Post-Canon, Unrequited Love, diverges after s3 i guess, i showed up to the faberry fandom five years late w bad fanfiction, idk it's in the future but a different future if that makes sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 14:45:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11648757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevensevan/pseuds/sevensevan
Summary: On Quinn's nighttime flight home, they stop in New York. Or, Quinn reflects on could-have-beens.





	i wonder if you live there still (i kinda think you always will)

**Author's Note:**

> i took a break from working on my other faberry fic to write this. based on hard to find by the national.

On Quinn’s nighttime flight home, they stop in New York.

She doesn’t even have to get off the plane; the layover is only long enough for a few passengers to get off and a few new ones to get on. Quinn gazes out the window the whole time, silently glad she had reserved a window seat.

The lights of the city flicker and glow beyond the airstrip. The skyline is as busy and vibrant as ever; neon paints the sides of buildings and streetlights glow high into the night. Quinn can’t see the stars, but it doesn’t bother her. She’s looking at a city filled with enough light to outshine a hundred thousand distant, burning giants.

Unbidden, Rachel springs to her mind. Specifically, an image of Rachel dancing in the street before nationals, that first time in New York, mostly unaware of the stares she was attracting from strangers, entirely unaware of the unconscious, wistful, _yearning_ stare she was getting from Quinn.

Quinn allows herself a moment of weakness, one she hasn’t indulged in for years. She takes out her phone, typing Rachel’s name in.

_Rachel Barbra Berry is an American singer, songwriter, actress…_

Quinn scrolls past a long list of achievements, awards, performances, and a discography, ignoring the bittersweet twisting in her stomach that shows itself every time she thinks of just how far Rachel has gone, just how unimaginably breathtaking she’s become. She finds the information she’s looking for in a brief section on Rachel’s personal life, and even though the lines about a high school glee club make Quinn’s ribcage feel painfully tight, she smiles the slightest bit upon learning that Rachel still lives in New York.

Of _course_ she still lives in New York. Quinn shakes her head at the fact that she ever even questioned it. She’d only visited Rachel a few times in college, but she’d seen the way she _belonged_ in the city. She didn’t blend in; Quinn’s sure that Rachel couldn’t be like everybody else if she wanted to, and she never has. But the city suited her; Rachel had walked the streets like she owned them, and even though Quinn hasn’t seen her in years, she’s positive she still does.

She lets herself imagine, for a moment; she allows her mind to drift away. She pictures leaping up from her seat and running down the aisle between the seats, rushing off the plane and out of the airport without her bags or belongings. In her head, she hails a cab outside the airport and takes it to Times Square. She jumps out and goes running through the streets and somehow, she ends up at Rachel’s door.

In the world inside her head, Rachel opens the door with a gasp and a smile, and she pulls Quinn inside and into her arms. She sits her down on her couch and plies her with wine and things fall back into place, with Rachel smiling and touching and dancing around the line between friendship and more, and Quinn falling so completely, inevitably in love all over again.

In her head, she kisses Rachel on a street corner. They narrowly miss getting hit by a car, and Rachel laughs, tells her she’s crazy, and kisses her again, and maybe it’s a few years later than Quinn had planned, but the end of the story is the same as it was always supposed to be: Quinn and Rachel and this unprecedented love.

The plane engines rumble to life. For a moment, Quinn is seized with a barely repressible desire to do everything she had just dreamed about, to make that fantasy life, that happy ending, come true. But she digs her fingernails into her armrests and listens to the pilot’s voice crackling over the loudspeaker and reminds herself that there are eight million people in New York City, and as much as Rachel always has and always will shine brighter than every single one, Quinn would never be able to find her in a city filled with so many lights.

(Quinn ignores the voice in her mind that whispers to her, reminding her that she would always, _always_ find Rachel.)

Quinn doesn’t dislike flying. As the wheels lift off of the tarmac, she clenches her fists on her armrests, but not because of the rapidly growing distance between herself and the ground.

Because of the rapidly growing distance between herself and _Rachel_.

It’s a stupid thought and she knows it; unused metro passes and unfulfilled promises to stay in touch, to be the best friends Rachel wanted them to be, mean nothing so many years later. But the thought comes to her unbidden anyway, and she watches the city lights shrink beneath her, fingernails digging into her palms, wishing with every part of her soul that she was just a little bit braver.

(She remembers Rachel in high school, when it seemed as though the entire world was trying to tear her down, _keep_ her down, keep her trapped in Lima for the rest of her life. She remembers the way Rachel kept singing and smiling and taking the vicious bullying like it didn’t even touch her.

God, how Quinn wishes she had even the slightest bit of that strength.)

“Nervous flyer?” the man beside her asks politely. Quinn gives him a forced smile and shrugs.

“Just sad to be leaving,” she says, her eyes returning to the window.

Thousands of feet below, the lights of New York flicker and glow.

Somewhere amongst them, Rachel Berry looks out her bedroom window and sees the flashing lights of an airplane shooting away into the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> i don't even know okay i wrote this at three in the morning. leave a comment and kudos! this is my first posted foray into glee fic and i would love some feedback.


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